Digital Divide Data, a nonprofit, trains disadvantaged
workers in the developing world. The program is offered in Cambodia, Laos and
Kenya.
Reporting from Phnom Penh,
Cambodia— When Yon Meakchan isn't converting publications into electronic form
for customers such as Stanford University, he pedals his bicycle 10 miles south
from his office to the rural edges of this city of 2 million people to help his
family, pulling weeds in rice paddies, tending to banana trees and wading into
a murky river to bathe oxen.
"Poor people work very
hard," said Yon, the eldest of eight children who grew up in a bamboo and
thatched-roof house. "If they want to buy nice clothes or a motorbike,
they can't. But the rich people can buy nice clothes. They can buy motorbikes.
I want to be that rich person."
Yon, 22, now has a shot at a
life beyond poverty thanks to Digital Divide Data, a 10-year-old nonprofit with
roots in Silicon Valley that trains disadvantaged workers in the developing
world for entry-level technology jobs. In the developing world — Digital Divide
has operations in Laos and Kenya as well as Cambodia — a small amount of
training can be the difference between grinding poverty and a comfortable life.
Although the organization
pulled in about $2.3 million in revenue last year, its core mission is to train
and educate those like Yon, who works six-hour shifts while also attending a
university.
During the five-year training
program, he and other employees earn $85 a month, a good salary for part-time
employment in Cambodia's impoverished economy. They also get a college
scholarship worth at least 65% of costs, healthcare insurance and extensive
English lessons.
Graduates leave well on their
way to a better life. They earn two to three times the $150 average monthly
salary of Cambodian university graduates, the organization says.
The training gives them hope in
a world where dreams are often crushed, said Mai Siriphongpanh, a Digital
Divide Data board member.
"Dreams are not for poor
people," she said. "Today you have to worry about what will happen to
you tomorrow. Will you have food to eat?"
When Yon's 8-year-old sister
recently contracted typhoid fever, he had to borrow $40 from a teacher to pay
for her medicine. While life remains a struggle, he is brimming with optimism.
He hopes to one day become a university professor and earn enough to ease the
burdens of his family.
Digital Divide Data was launched
with donations from Silicon Valley venture capitalists and receives funding
from the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto and support from companies including San
Jose networking giant Cisco Systems. Its client list includes universities
around the globe and publishers who use the nonprofit to digitize books for
Apple Inc.'s iPad, Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle and Sony Corp.'s Reader. Google
Inc. hired the nonprofit to manage its AdWords campaign in Africa.
"We've got kids living in
the slums at night and managing AdWords during the day," said Chief
Executive Jeremy Hockenstein, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who
co-founded the organization. "If it can work there, it can work in other
countries with slums and office towers."
Governments in developing
countries recognize the enormous potential of outsourcing companies to provide
jobs, but they are usually for "the more educated and affluent
people," said Susan Kagondu, a researcher in the Rockefeller Foundation's
Africa office, which supports Digital Divide Data.
A report in June funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation estimated that the income of workers like Yon can soar
as much as 200% when they are employed by outsourcing operations such as
Digital Divide Data, which has about 750 trainees and full-time employees in
addition to 400 alumni. The study said that by 2015, nearly 800,000
bottom-of-the-pyramid workers could be employed in regions including Southeast
Asia and Africa, representing 11% of the $178-billion global market for
so-called business process outsourcing.
While the report notes that
global outsourcing is draining the United States of some jobs, Hockenstein said
the work done by his employees — tedious and time-consuming data entry and
database creation and management — would be prohibitively expensive to do in
the United States.
"A university couldn't
afford to spend several million dollars to digitize a library, but it can
afford to spend a few hundred thousand dollars" by hiring organizations
like his, he said. His model is to spread some of the work to areas of the
world beyond India, China and the Philippines, which he said represent about
80% of the outsourcing industry. "If we can harness a huge flow of revenue
that is already out there, we could get more people out of poverty."
Many of Digital Divide Data's
services do not require a lot of analytical skills. Nonetheless, they are
crucial, said Cathy Aster, project manager at Stanford's digital library
systems and services department. "They are helping to make a larger
portion of our cultural heritage available in an online environment to a
population from around the world," she said.
G. Leonard Baker Jr., managing
director of Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto and a longtime financial
supporter of Digital Divide Data, was taken by the vision of Harvard-educated
Hockenstein and his model to create an organization that generates its own
income and therefore is less dependent on donations. "It's an incredibly
cost-efficient use of charitable dollars," Baker said. "It's truly
amazing."
Cynthia Hauck, a former Silicon
Valley programmer who is the organization's chief operating officer, keeps an
eye on revenue and gross margins. But, she said, Digital Divide Data's bottom
line is "to use the profits to reinvest in our social mission." That includes
encouraging some of her best trainees to look for work elsewhere in hopes of
becoming business and government leaders.
Chhum Bunthy, a 25-year-old who
has been in the program for three years, is studying to be an architect. He
lives in a two-story, bricks-and-concrete home with his family, which doesn't
have enough money to complete the unfinished building. His father works as a
laborer and his mother is a street vendor who sells barbecued beef.
"My dream is for her to
stop selling the beef," said Chhum, who leaves home every day at 4:30 a.m.
He eyed his mother, 47-year-old Chun Chhen, putting bits of beef on skewers,
flies buzzing around her face. "I want her and [my father] to be able to
stay home."
John Boudreau
Boudreau writes for the San
Jose Mercury News/McClatchy.
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